Contemporary Printmaking: When Anything is Possible What is Desirable?

Rochelle Toner

Over the past couple of decades we have witnessed an unprecedented change in the visual arts. Art has moved out of museums and galleries onto the streets, into popular culture and onto the body. Art has moved from elitist object to the broadest possible spectrum of manifestations in fine art, folk or outsider art, craft, design, performance, installation, digital and every possible permutation of traditional and non-traditional materials and media. Artists, curators and writers now move freely between the former categories of high and low art, permanent and ephemeral, curatorial and studio practice. Artists move between materials and media without boundaries and without hesitation.

In my experience most young artists today do not limit themselves to distinct and separate media fields. If they identify as printmakers it is more a social statement, a community choice, rather than a narrowly defined media preference. Certainly some of us continue to practice printmaking in a rather traditional manner but most young artists do not limit themselves in any way

The visual arts have never been broader and more inclusive. These changes in the visual arts have come about through the work of artists, teachers, writers and curators. I believe that the field of printmaking has had a significant roll to play because printmakers have historically crossed boundaries and subverted the commercial divisions of design, high and low art. And, also because printmakers were early adopters of digital technologies.

For the most part this explosion of technological innovation has been in the 2D areas, but with the recent accessibility of more modestly priced 3D printers wide spread use of the technology to make 3D objects, that is 3D prints, is likely to increase significantly. Once again artists have raided commercial and industrial practice for use in the arts.

Changes in the visual arts have been stimulated by changes in society brought about by political, cultural and technological change. Although these social changes are complex and incomplete they have had an unprecedented impact.

There are many social and economic factors which have contributed to these changes in the art world but four of the major ones are the ongoing fight for the rights and inclusion of racial minorities, the feminist and women’s movement, the gender and sexual revolution and the explosion of technology. Forgive me for my simplification and grouping of these very different social and cultural phenomena.

My point is this, artists have participated in these changes, reflected them in their work and brought them to the public in ways that no other segment of society has. I believe that printmakers have long played a significant roll in this evolution and in taking the “preciousness” out of art practice.

The commercial art world has had and will continue to have a vested interest in keeping art precious, elite and rare. Some printmakers may have longed for inclusion in that club, against the very nature of printmaking, where multiples and broad distribution are at the heart of the process. As printmakers we give our work away, we trade it, we participate in exchange portfolios and generally we embrace the idea of making our work accessible.

We do not tend to divide ourselves up into figurative, abstract or landscape camps. We tend to be open to everything from posters and cartooning to the most refined mezzotint. And, I believe that the broader “art world” has come to embrace many of these underlying principles of inclusion and accessibility.

Which brings me finally to the artists that I recommended for inclusion in the exhibition at East Carolina University. In my mind I wanted to reflect at least some of this diversity of images, methods and materials. I also wanted to include young printmakers who are just getting started and older more established printmakers. My only regret is that my choices couldn’t have been even more diverse. In a single gallery show it is almost impossible to fully reflect the range of work that can be loosely called printmaking today, especially that work in printmaking that doesn’t lend itself to the traditional exhibition model.

Fortunately the co-curated format of the exhibition allowed for a remarkably broad ranging group of prints and participating printmakers. The show includes a variety of installation work, art out on the streets and in the community as well as the traditional print techniques that we all love to see. And, although there is no body art formally included in the exhibition the artists, students and faculty contributed a wide range of body work to the general environment of the show.

At the SGC Conference in Philadelphia in 2010 there was an international festival of contemporary art called Philagrafika. There were over thirty major exhibitions dedicated to the impact that the traditional, experimental and creative frontiers of printmaking have had on all forms of artistic practice. Printmaking and print practice has had an enormous impact on contemporary art even though it is not always credited or even recognized.

Digital technology has undoubtedly had a huge influence on many of these developments. For artists, especially for young artists having so much predigested visual material readily available on the internet presents new problems and obstacles as well as the obvious opportunities. If everything is wide open, as Arthur Danto calls it “radical openness”, then how do we determine what work is worth spending time with? What is genuine and individual as opposed to a clever pastiche of appropriated images and information?

From my point of view the pertinent questions have not changed: is the work demanding, is the work visually rich, is the work challenging, does the work make me think and is there something magic about it?

When anything is possible, what is desirable?

Copies of the book are available online.