New Prints 2008/Autumn

Essay by Matthew Day Jackson

Beyond drawing, across painting and into the world of sculpture lies the body of the print. Its skeleton is made of metal and stone, its heart pumps chroma and its flesh is that of mesh. Although the print most often is flat, the way in which the plates are made lies in the realm of alchemy – turning the surface from that of the physical to the illusory, turning common materials into gold, into a material that can illuminate dreams, into a window into the core of ourselves. Printmaking is a shape changer: the creator of the print has manipulated its likeness in a million ways, leaving it virtually unrecognizable from its predecessors. One could call it the missing link in the visual arts – sharing the attributes of all while having an appearance all its own.

The print, a medium relegated to the corners of artistic practice, has quietly been the place marked by great artistic achievement over the last five hundred years. Dürer, Rembrandt, Redon, Goya, Kollwitz, Hiroshige, Hokusai, Picasso, Johns, Rauschenberg, Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, just to name a few, have made radical leaps through the print medium and into the world of great images. Most often this is not recognized in the marketplace which prioritizes the unique object, but oftentimes does not know what to do with the multiple – somehow seeing it like a whore whose promise of love is heard by many. This of course lacks a true understanding of the medium in that the process – and the “product” – is uniquely itself; the etched line, or carved line is decidedly unique to the process and to the medium.

Whores and misunderstanding aside, the Russian constructivists pushed toward an art by and for the proletariat, to broaden the horizon of the working class. The print born in workshops was often the only art that most could afford aside from self-produced artwork. Another facet of accessibility is the democracy of the edition; a great image could be made en masse and shared, while simultaneously retaining its strength and singularity as a handmade object, loosing only minimal resolution in the process of multiplication.

There was a time that Hiroshige and Hokusai images were used for wrapping paper, and in many cases this was the introduction of ukiyo-e to the western world. Käthe Kollwitz was labeled by the Nazis a “degenerate” artist, because of the graphic work she made in protest to war and poverty. Because of the power and availability of the graphic image, her work was threatening to the apocalyptic ideal of the Nazi regime. Fearlessly, she created images that still haunt and inspire us today.
The print was fast and cheap, and infinitely malleable, just like the internet and Photoshop® of today. Because of the ability to duplicate images, its communicative power was constantly mined in the form of propaganda. Today we live in a time in which images are proliferated at a rate that would make even the fastest printing presses cower in defeat. This is the age of a new psychedelic, no more lava lamps, or tracers, but rather just the multiplication of an image is the thing that makes it strange. Just like saying one’s own name a hundred times, the most familiar can sound as though spoken with alien tongue. However, today, the print is not common. It is now the inverse; images are common, and infinitely malleable. Images being scattered digitally over the internet are similar to the scattering of propaganda from airplanes. As our lives become increasingly virtual, and the image/object rarefied, the print will become increasingly important.

Printmaking is a now a geriatric medium which is easier to investigate, much like studying a three-toed sloth in reference to studying a cheetah at a full gate. I am not suggesting that the medium (or any other for that matter) is near death, but rather aging in reverse. The re-emergence of printmaking in the sixties and seventies was the product of pushing the medium to the very edge of its physicality, and its practitioners to the edge of their knowledge. Now that we have seen the physical parameters pushed, we can be free to explore the medium beyond the heroic into just making good art in any shape, form or process. We can now see its subtlety, and its quiet qualities. If necessary, we can also be heroic, and push the medium as well. As technology continues to accelerate, the communicative medium of the past will be a place of solitude. The print is not alone; painting, drawing, sculpture and the rest of the objects will nestle comfortably into necessity in that we need these things to tell us where and who we are. They are mile markers on our human journey. The print medium as noted early on in this essay, is the place where it all comes together, and because of its poorly defined boundaries (thankfully so) it will continue to be a place of discovery.

Thank you to all of the artists who submitted work for these shows, and to those contributing work to them. It makes me happy to call myself an artist and to be in your company.

 

© 2008 International Print Center New York