vi191009 Welcome to my printmaking world -

Where prints are smart 

The printmaking world, according to my lights, is a world where prints are the highest form of intelligence. I learned about such things from a friend of mine, Carl Chew, whose Stamp World was one where artistamps are the highest form of intelligence.

The distribution of 240 Halfwood Presses worldwide.

Many people think that prints belong in the art world, where artworks are the highest form of intelligence. The fact is, artworks in and of themselves have no intelligence at all, let alone high – or low, for that matter. To exist at all, artworks must be given print forms.

The difference between art and prints is negotiation. Prints are negotiable, whereas artworks are not – not without the introduction of prints. For an artwork to be negotiated – that is, transferred from one entity to another – requires mediation.

Generally, art cannot be experienced without mediation – a photograph or digital image, for example – which are prints. I would include plane tickets or museum admission tickets. Such prints – both physical and/or digital – mediate between the art and he or she who experiences it. Print includes text, such as descriptors, textbooks and magazine articles.

Prints that are considered fine art migrate easily into and out of the digital media. Prints are experienced as hanging on walls or in folios. As most prints are on paper, they are highly portable, being mostly of small scale. This is negotiability – the ability to be transferred and exchanged.

Paintings, on the other hand, are less so. That’s why painters make prints – the costs to the buyer being less and the prints themselves more readily shipped to multiple destinations.

The negotiability doesn’t end there because a number of people can experience and own a print from a publication – each print like every other print but varying inasmuch they were printed in succession. Two things are notable about this – one is that they may vary and, two, an invisible link is made among people who have examples of the print.

Stephen Hazel, a twentieth century artist, wrote a paper titled, “The Print is in 4-Space” in which he described this phenomenon as a kind of community-building. However, he didn’t develop this observation – it remained for me to extend into the digital age. He died before he could participate fully in the print as part of the Internet, the so-called IoT, the Internet of Things, defined by Wikipedia as:

“A system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.”

How is this of value to people who need and want prints to be part of both the print world and the art world? The answer lies in economics – the negotiability of prints not only in the sharing of cost-free exchange, such as on an artist’s website where people can experience the visual character of the print, but two economic worlds: experience and creative.

The experience economy is in the replacement of physical objects for sale to the experience around objects. For example, the business models of Build-A-Bear or eating in a restaurant that’s supposed to be in a jungle setting.

The creative economy is business models that rely on artists of all stripes to attract commerce – such as a city boasting of an art district, or a neighborhood that erects an unusual playground to attract visitors.

The print world offers both experience and creativity, making it a world where one’s intellect is stimulated and rewarded easily as well as offering a potential for development of experiences and creativity.

The global map above is my example. It shows locations of owners of etching presses I designed and helped build and sell – the presses themselves capable of making prints for the printmaking world. The owners of the presses are “linked” in the sense that Stephen Hazel postulated and, furthermore, are potential instruments of further extending the scope of the printmaking world.