2006 CAA Conference Session
Convergent Theories: Printmaking, Photography and Digital Media
Speakers:
Ruth Pelzer Montada, Edinburgh College of Art
The Drag of Printmaking—Printmaking as Drag?
Donna Moran, Pratt Institute
Printmaking, Photography, and Digital Media
Dorothy Simpson Krause, artist
The Convergence of Printmaking, Photography, and Digital Media: An Artist's Perspective
www.dotkrause.com
Nancy Jo Haselbacher, artist, Los Angeles
Trace Elements: Printmaking, Digital Media, and the Nature of the Unseen
www.indeliblepress.com
Session Intoduction
Hello everyone and welcome to the session Convergent Theories: Printmaking, Photography and Digital Media. I am Kevin Haas, the session chair, and am very pleased to introduce our four speakers today. Although the title of this session may imply a great deal of unity in what will be presented by each of our speakers this afternoon, this is far from the case. The word convergence implies a coming together. This may be a lasting characteristic but could also be a very temporary state from which new directions may also emerge as things return to their points of origin or to new locations. There are many possible convergences and intersections when fields as broad as Printmaking, Photography, and Digital Media are brought together; some of which we will see today.
First I would like to share a little of what has led me to this topic and consequently brought us here today. This session emerged primarily out of my own limited knowledge on the issues we will touch upon and my desire to seek out other artists who are addressing similar intersections and could provide a more informed and thorough examination of the topic.
[SLIDE] As my own work exploring the urban environment shifted to consider the relationships between experience, memory, and the technologies we use to see and represent our world, the work I produced became more and more technologically complex. I began using 35mm film or digital video and now shoot primarily with a digital SLR.
[SLIDE] This visual information is digitally combined, altered, output as digital films, exposed to lithography and intaglio plates and finally printed by hand, often onto delicate papers. For me, the use of these processes became more than just a means to an end.
[SLIDE] The articulation of technologies and their transforming effects on the image, bore similarities to how we experience events, and how the photographic representation of an event can reshape or replace our memory. [SLIDE] I quickly realized that I had entered a territory that was exciting to me, but that I was also not fully familiar with. I was unsure of how the intersections of these three different media were being examined critically, taking into account their histories and the writing that has surrounded them. Although printmaking looks to some of the same art historical texts as photography, such as those concerning reproduction, it has not shared the outpouring of historical and theoretical writing like those devoted to photography and digital media in the last several decades. Although the three mediums have developed along their own historical courses they have always remained intertwined in some way.
[SLIDE: Niepce] Some of the very first photographs were made by printing metal plates etched with images captured by light such as this heliograph here. Despite this, photography’s concerns today are distinctly different from those of printmaking. Upon its invention, photography became the ‘Pencil of Nature’, unencumbered by the slow burin of engraving. These types of division still continue in institutional structures we see today where photographs and works on paper such as drawings and prints are dealt with by different departments within a museum or within academia. In actuality, both mediums have shared a struggle to be viewed as equal to other established and accepted forms of art. Photography has clearly exceeded any perceived limitations, because of how it has been used to shape critical discourses on the politics of images and looking, and because of the impact of its various social roles. The prominence of video since the late 90’s has created new room for photography to take hold with the art world, and it has comfortably settled alongside painting, sculpture and the widespread resurgence in drawing that we are now witnessing. Printmaking is also a thriving field of practice supported by an enthusiastic community of artists. Although it has played a significant role in art throughout the 20th century and now, and has been a central part of many artists strategies for dissemination and communication, it has not always been the focus of the dialogue. What I would briefly like to share now are just a few instances that seem important to the interrelationships of these mediums.
[SLIDE: Stephen Shore] Stephen Shore’s photographic project documenting Amarillo, TX was produced as postcards, and sold at various shops in the area. It was a natural and appropriate format for it to take based on his observations of the everyday and placing the images back into that world.
[SLIDE: Felix Gonzalez-Torres] The same is true for Felix Gonzalez-Torres. His endless prints and use of multiples turn the art object into meaningful and personal gestures for everyone to share in. [SLIDE] Works like these instinctively use what is inherent to both mediums; the focus on multiplicity moves them away from the aspirations and preciousness of photography or printmaking individually. The impact of works like these by Shore and Gonzalez-Torres is implicit in their making. But the ubiquity of offset reproduction makes the process of dissemination invisible.
[SLIDE: Vik Muniz] Perhaps the most obvious connection between photography and printmaking is through the halftone process and the commercial forms of printing that utilize it. The ability to accurately reproduce and disseminate photographs through this process is perhaps one of the most important inventions in printing since moveable type. We know the world not through actual photographs, but through printed reproductions of photographs. Vik Muniz exaggerates this fact through his recreation of reproductions of famous images such as the exploding Hindenburg here. The reproductions, re-painted dot by dot by hand with ink, are further enlarged after being photographed, revealing not only the artificial structure of the image, but also the physical characteristics of the ink.
[SLIDE: Sigmar Polke] Sigmar Polke too has been fascinated by the halftone dot and it’s imperfections and flaws, despite the regularity and systemization it implies. His hand painting of benday dots by hand finalizes his transformative re-arrangements and the breakdown of the once meaningful information. This painting here is titled the History of Everything I, in which human endeavor is reduced to indecipherable and endless reproduction.
However, the surface of a photograph typically repels our touch to favor visual inspection instead. We know how an oily thumbprint can permanently mar the glossy surface of a photograph, or even its reproduction in magazines and books. In contrast, the surface created by printing is the residue of intense physical contact; it is the intimate record of ink, stone, metal, scrapers, and knives. Touching or physically altering the intact photographic surface would forever disturb its semblance of the real. Although prints can also be precious objects, the physicality of their making and finished presence invites looking to be a physical form of retracing touch.
When the hand and the photograph meet a point of transgression can occur.
[SLIDE: Daniele Buetti] This purity of the photographic surface can also encourage defacing, an act the artist Daniele Buetti cannot resist. He draws onto the back of images from fashion magazines with ballpoint pen to deface and scar the models with the names of the very products of consumerism and desire they are meant to embody. This violence of marking, cutting and rupturing, has been one of the mainstays of the 20th century for artists working in collage often with a subversive intent.
[SLIDE: Alexander Apostol] Photographs again differ from prints in that they are typically unable to reveal the craft of their making. Their seamless nature maintains the moment that has been snatched out of time. But when this is taken away, our reading of the image is disrupted.
The convergence of photography and digital media has appeared to be such a fundamental shift to some practitioners that photography was pronounced ‘dead’ in a world where all images are suspect. The fact that we cannot know immediately whether or not an image has been digitally altered has bred this mistrust. Since touch and craft remain invisible, exact intentions may be difficult to recognize.
The buildings in Alexander Apostol’s photographs seem like ordinary renditions of brutalist architecture, until we realize there is no way in or out whatsoever. By careful digital altering of the photographs, he has quite literally boarded up these buildings to be left as deteriorating monuments.
The manipulation and alteration of images has been part of the history of photography since its inception, and truth has been a matter of subjectivity, not an inherent quality of the medium. The crisis digital technology has created for printmaking is the inability to clearly distinguish or define a print from a digital image or a photograph. The artist’s touch, one of the foundations of printmaking, becomes suspended in a sea of technology not as familiar or forthcoming as the direct imprint.
[SLIDE: Wade Guyton] The ‘printer-drawings’ of Wade Guyton both participate with and negate their modernist sources to acknowledge the complicity of his actions with cultural and technological aspirations. The bold shapes printed in red are again an attempt at defacing, but the transparency of the ink from the printer merges with the pure geometric sculptures of Gabo and in part take on their ideology.
Artists have often turned to printmaking for the materiality it can give an image, and when combined with photography, it can provide rich surfaces and new options of manipulation that will shift meaning and presence, while providing a unity of surface.
[SLIDE: Lorna Simpson] Felt replaces paper in Lorna Simpson’s series of screenprinted photographs and text. It seems an unusual choice at first, but the comforting and warm material invites the viewer in despite the impersonal images of public and private views within a city. We then read the text and become engaged in narratives that leave just enough specific details out that we must complete the scenes ourselves. The felt has an undeniable presence, as does the ink resting on it, bringing the photograph into our immediate presence.
[SLIDE] Photographs can be carriers of absence, of moments, places and people gone or unknown. Printing can create its own presence, a new moment separate from the opening of the shutter. These pieces leave us between these moments and as participants in the events described.
[SLIDE: Kiki Smith] When printmaking converges with photography and digital media we encounter the world compressed between many points, were the hybrid form reveals how we process the mediation of our lives. Kiki Smith sheds her skin in her print ‘My Blue Lake’, which was facilitated by a camera that photographs ‘in the round’ encircling its subject. Freed from her skeletal structure, her likeness becomes liquid and is able to take on the qualities of earth and water. The physicality of the body, its sensuousness and flaws remain in the surface of the print.
[SLIDE: Joey Kotting] The slowness of printmaking creates inertia against photography and digital media. In Joey Kotting’s prints, the brevity of a moment is drawn out into the careful layering and arranging of images [SLIDE] and surfaces that are the residue of looking and studying a moment through the different mediums.
These few examples help locate the significance of the interactions between printmaking, photography and digital media. They are also responses to this evolving dialog that our four speakers are addressing today.
Nancy Haselbacher
Our first speaker this afternoon is Nancy Jo Haselbacher who will take us much deeper into some of the points I have just mentioned. In 2004 Nancy received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Prior to this she taught at the Art Institute of Boston where she was an associate professor and director of Academic Computing for ten years. She has also taught at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, here in Boston, and is currently a senior lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. At her Los Angeles studio, Indelible Press, she offers workshops on printmaking and digital media as well as continuing with her own practice as an artist. Today, Nancy will be presenting her own work, which explores the nuances of the physical imprint, the traces we leave behind, and how the unseen can be recorded. She reveals mystery, movement and presence within the body and the land through her use of printmaking and photography.
Dorothy Simpson Krause
Dorothy Simpson Krause, our second speaker, is co-author of the book Digital Art Studio, released in 2004. Written with her fellow Digital Atelier collaborators Karin Schminke and Bonny Lhotka, they have helped expand definitions of printmaking and its processes. She has educated not only artists but also museum curators and collectors about the possibilities and viability of digital printers for the fine arts. For over thirty years she has been a figure in the Boston arts community with work in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, as an educator and administrator at the Massachusetts College of Art, and more recently through her solo exhibits at Judi Rotenburg Gallery. Throughout her career she has exhibited profusely across the US, as well as lectured and shared her experiences. Recent venues include The Center for Contemporary Printmaking in CT, The Danforth Museum of Art, the Jewett Art Center at Wellesley College to name just a few. Dorothy will provide an overview of the trajectory of her career and how it has help shaped our use of technology. Her journey will illuminate the importance of technological investigations and how they filter into the artistic community.
Donna Moran
As chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute and professor of printmaking, our next speaker Donna Moran has experienced first hand how changing technologies can affect pedagogy and the day-to-day teaching of technology dependent art forms. She will examine technology as a burden and a diversion that can prevent us from addressing issues of content and questioning our roles as artists. She has had solo exhibits in cities as widespread as Melbourne Australia where she exhibited at the Victorian College of Art and in Lima Peru at the North-American Cultural Institute. Donna’s work can be found in the collection of the New York Public Library, and at Rabbet Gallery in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Besides the Pratt Institute, Donna has also taught at William Patterson College, the Parsons School of Design where she has helped develop the curriculum in Printmaking, and is also a member of the NASAD Steering Committee.
Ruth Pelzer-Montada
Our final speaker today is Ruth Pelzer-Montada, who joins us from the Edinburgh College of Art, where she is a lecturer in visual and critical studies. Currently she is completing a practice based PhD at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, Scotland where she is examining the theoretical issues that arise from her artistic practice in printmaking involving repetition, seriality and simulation. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in Scotland and abroad, including a solo exhibition in 2003 at Galerie Zement, in Frankfurt Germany. She has also presented at several other major conferences, most recently at ‘Impact 4’ the International Printmaking Conference in Berlin and Poznan last fall. Her paper today is titled: The Drag of Printmaking – Printmaking as Drag? She will explore the various meanings of ‘drag’ and how they can be applied to the tactility of print in relation to photographic and digital surfaces.
After all of the presentations this afternoon we will have time for questions and further discussion. And with that, I welcome our first speaker today, Nancy Haselbacher.
Original Session Proposal
This panel seeks presentations that consider how printmaking can, or may already, exist within the discourse and theories that have surrounded photography and digital media, to acknowledge the interrelationships these three mediums share, particularly for artists producing photographic and digitally based prints.
Do we accept that printmaking is simply included, if not explicitly stated, in the theories that are used to read images, or do we view it as having made overlooked contributions to the dialogue? Although fine art printmaking as a whole continues to remain distinct from photography and digital media, they all share key texts on art and reproduction, a dependence on technology, an awareness of visual studies, and parallel dialogues about the impact of new media. This panel should provide a forum to explore what need there might be to consider or intersect theories and ideas from photography and digital media in relation to those of printmaking, to situate it within contemporary debates on the image.
We now operate in what is increasingly referred to as a ‘post-medium era’, where conceptual and pragmatic concerns overrule any strict conventions held by a particular medium. Practices, materials, ideologies all exist in a free mix of possibilities guided and inspired by the culture as a whole. Digital Media has often been at the center of this intermix, at times seeming to suck all other media into its realm. This convergence has been felt very strongly within the realm of photography, where the impact has been so extreme that some have heralded the ‘death’ of photography in a world where all images are suspect. The crisis digital technology has created for printmaking is the inability to clearly distinguish or define a print from digital image or a photograph. The artist’s touch, one of the foundations of printmaking, becomes suspended in a sea of technology not as familiar or forthcoming as the direct imprint. Although the walls separating printmaking from these other mediums have been defensively thick at times, mere screens at others, their noticeable collapse in the wake of digital media reveals a space in which we are unable ignore our neighbors.
Printmaking seems to bear little currency in the swell of writing on photography and digital media, although we are inevitably in the midst of their influence. Despite the significant role printmaking has played in art throughout the 20th century and currently, it has not shared the outpouring of theoretical writing like which has been devoted to photography in the last several decades. This is due considerably to the fact that all photo-based imagery (advertising, amateur, scientific) is included in the discourse, not just what is labeled ‘fine art’ photography. This is not to say that photography does not have its own divisions, but they do not compare to the longstanding division printmaking has maintained between commercial printing and fine art printmaking. Fine art printmaking does, however, rely greatly on innovations in the commercial printing and computer software industries, to facilitate its own contemporary developments. Perhaps the other reason that printmaking hasn’t shared the same rigor of critical theory is that it is still a relatively new phenomenon for photography, only emerging in the late 70’s and now fueled further by the advent of digital media. New modes of inquiry began to emerge within printmaking in the early 90’s, but the field has yet to make a noticeable place for itself in the more predominate mediums that it intersects with.
Although a print may rely solely on a photograph or a digitally generated image, the processes or techniques used are often privileged over its meanings when viewed from within the field of printmaking. Debates over how an image exists within the culture and how it signifies its meaning, have typically taken place outside the discourses of printmaking. However, we cannot deny that prints are, after all, just images, open to the same scrutiny any image would receive. Prints have in fact been an important part of the history of photography and digital media. It’s just that they are not necessarily identified as such, unless it bears special significance.
Where and how does printmaking begin to converge into this larger discourse? How will considering what has emerged in photography and digital media allow us to rethink the role prints have already played historically? How can printmaking’s contributions to, and reliance upon, photography and digital media establish itself within current critical theory?