pp200328 Value your museum: Your future has arrived

The future of the brick and mortar museum has been questioned for two generations of the information age. It’s like the 1850’s when halftone photography made mechanical printing plates feasible. A surge in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)… 

 It’s happening

The future of the brick and mortar museum has been questioned for two generations of the information age. It’s like the 1850’s when halftone photography made mechanical printing plates feasible.

The surge in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) was unstoppable, yet printing in the old ways continued in the arts. Artists found the obsolete printing methods useful, freed of the pressures of mass production associated with publishing.

The Internet caused a similar sea-change in the art world. Art museums and galleries, however, hung in there because the physical presence of tangible artworks means more than what meets the eye.

There’s something about the presence of a real artwork that transcends digital communication – like the presence of a real person!

Then how shall we deal with it? As an artist, I love to meet people who like my art whether or not they buy it. If distance makes this impossible, then knowing they ordered it online and received it is enough. I can imagine my art somewhere in their home.

Thankfully, I can communicate with my art patrons and people who own the presses I designed for printmaking via email and social media. Thanks to the web, I can even communicate with my former students from fifty years ago!

An old movie image comes to mind as Carlton Heston ponders humankind and time in the movie, Planet of the Apes. “Are people still cruel to their neighbors?” he asks. I ponder, “Will people return to museums when – and if – the corona virus is brought under control?”

What about the present? What about artists who are faced with cancelled gallery exhibits, art festivals and art museums? Art schools are closed and my cohort – printmaking teachers – are scrambling to figure out how to keep their students going.

A good question

I liked a question posed on the Facebook group addressing the emergency, Printmaking Distance Learning:

Hello all, I am looking for a good (ideally short) reading on the history of the printing press and its impact on society, its relationship to mass media, accessibility etc... Similarly, along the same lines, how about a reading about print media, such as the newspaper, and its history up until today (its decline and takeover by internet/digital media, much like the decline in printed books...). Open to any resources related to these topics as well (like videos, podcasts, exhibition websites, etc...) Any suggestions?! – Professor Beverly Acha, University of Texas at Austin

Historically, I think print was always closer to STEM than to fine art. This is not a welcome concept for people (and I am one of these people) who, as students, never cared as much for science, tech, engineering and math as much as they cared about arts and humanities.

Change was forced on me when I was a professor at Ms. Acha’s stage in her career. Today, if what I think about print and STEM is of use, then what is it? If it’s valid, then what to do about it today when the whole shebang – faculty, administrators and students - is on forced leave of absence, shut out of the art buildings?

Hope

Professor Acha sets the stage, a forum, for hope! I compare it to the flat bed of a press – that piece of equipment around which people of all stripes gathered for centuries. Priests, paper makers, artists and business people used printmaking; and when presses were invented to be more effective, they benefited – each in their own domains-of-expertise.

Now, for almost everyone in art schools, presses are under lock and key. It’s like a dictator took over and banned independent printing - like entering a kind of censorship.

Where’s creativity?

However, we have the Internet– the child of the press - for now. Printmaking is the ancestor of all STEM, yet when the pressure grew to train more technical people, the creative element of research had a hard time.

I get comfort when uneasy around “STEM people” by thinking creativity, imagination, discovery and innovation are part of STEM, and Art has these cornerstones in common with the world of science and the rest. I research how to fit Art into STEM and make it STEAM.

I’m not alone – there’s a huge community who promote STEAM. There’s even one called STREAM which is R for Reading/Literature.

It’s in the moment

Where the press fits in, therefore, deserves hard study, and that’s why I was glad to see Professor Acha raise the question. She reminds me of that moment we printmakers enjoy, the moment we lift the freshly-printed paper off the plate lying on the bed of the press.

Sharing that moment is the key, in my opinion, that might open doors to reasons to make prints. Printmaking moments can be useful in the unfolding, post-corona virus future. If there is more than meets the eye in a print, it’s that moment of 4-dimensions: The height, width and depth of a print plus time – time marking the moment the print is pulled and time expressed by international agreement: GMT.

The date and the twenty-four-hour clock, in other words, can be part of the signature of the print. It states the moment it was pulled. Combined with the year, month and day, I call it the moment number. For example, I wrote this text as: 2003281012. The year 2020, month 03, day 28 hour 10 and minute 12 – that’s Pacific Standard time (for GMT, add 8 hours).[1]

In addition, today we have found GPS is useful. It’s stamped on every Google street view and satellite image. One pastime I like is to enter the address of a friend or owner of my work and look at their home via satellite. I “beam myself up” and get a birds-eye view and for a moment I can imagine myself flying over to them.

Somehow this helps me realize our relationships, similarly as to when they share an image on social media only, in my case, we share something of a physical kind, too, if I made an artwork that they see in their home – or an etching press which I designed and helped make.

In this way I would like to introduce to Professor Acha what I think the printing press has brought us to and what’s in printmaking education for her students’ futures. It’s a relationship few people have considered – STEM – in art schools because, until now, there was no need for it. Now students might need to know about this as part of the history of printing and art.

Let students be challenged to examine the history of the printing press in the STREAM age.

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[1] My friend Peter van Honk, an hour’s drive out of Amsterdam, thinks it’s about 6:30 and, for a moment, I can think of Peter and his Rembrandt project! I’m a time traveler!