This lecture was first presented at the 2000 Southern Graphics Council Conference. It was later revised and presented again at the Northwest Print Council's annual meeting and at Washington State University in 2001.
I will talk tonight about technology and images, particularly the printed kind of images, and the impact digital media has had on art making methods and techniques. Much of this talk comes from a paper I presented on the future of printmaking at the Northwest Print Council’s annual meeting last year in Portland. Since many of you in the audience may be unfamiliar with prints and printmaking please bear with me if some of this gets too proprietary. There isn’t any particular reason for most of you to have any concern about the little debates printmakers have, but hopefully what I choose to talk about tonight will shed some light on the role technology plays in artistic production. To simplify the matter for now, a print is simply a drawing…or a painting, or a collage, or a photograph, or a book, or a sculpture, or a digital image, or a billboard. Essentially it is any image that can be produced from a matrix created by an artist in editions of 10 to 10,000 or more. So it definitely does have something to do with technology, dissemination and making money, but it is not usually a reproduction of any other preexisting artwork that like you would find at a museum gift shop or the mall.
So with that in mind, it is the future of printmaking that has been on my mind quite a lot since I accepted this position at WSU. Since Rita Robillard stepped down as the area coordinator several years ago, Printmaking at WSU, without anyone to sustain the program, had fallen by the wayside. When I arrived, the chalkboard in the screenprinting room still had her name written on it with the due dates for assignments. As I began cleaning out the studios to ready them once again for use, I found the abandoned pieces of a printmaking program. Old oxidized plates, yellowing newsprint proofs, dried cans of ink, and substances not used for many years. It’s a bit like discovering a city whose inhabitants vanished in mid-stride. The evidence revealed a mature print program balancing traditional processes with the introduction of new methods and materials and a commitment to keeping students informed not just about printmaking, but the larger world of contemporary art and everything it touches upon. But, the neglected condition of the studios provoked me to question the relevance of attempting to restart a printmaking program; especially when there is a scarcity of funding. I wondered what would have happened to the equipment and the class projects pinned to the walls if no one had been hired to teach printmaking once again at WSU? It reminded me of driving around Chicago a number of years ago searching for a scrap yard where supposedly someone had seen a press. We never found it probably having been reduced to scrap already. Such is the fate of so much printmaking equipment, thought to be obsolete. My trip to the WSU library evoked a similar response. I found quite a range of books on lithography that I had never encountered before, many of them from 60’s and 70’s. The black and white halftones depicted a strange and arcane ritual, a ritual I still undertake with my students of rub-ups, washouts and, as the Brits once called them, acidulations, know to us as etches. I couldn’t help but make the analogy between teaching stone lithography and being a tour guide at an historic theme park, re-created to simulate life back in the olden days.
Shortly after I arrived here last fall I had an e-mail exchange with a curator of a large collection of 20th Century prints and drawings who stated that, depending on how you looked at it, the future of printmaking was bleak. That statement should have made me consider again what I was doing taking this position to restart the printmaking program. But to me it seems that now is an opportune time to undertake such an endeavor, perfectly timed with the growing acceptance of digital media and less-toxic processes. So, I wondered, which future of printmaking is bleak?
[BEGIN CONTRASTING SLIDES] My position at WSU is to teach both printmaking and digital imaging, two areas that have begun to overlap presenting new possibilities to artists and students alike. But the contrasts between the two areas are very pronounced; one is tactile and physically laborious, the other immobile and often disembodied. My printmaking class has just completed their first lithographs, and my afternoon digital imaging class has just discovered layer-masks in Photoshop. I start the day talking about buff-downs, grease content, adsorbed gum layers and hand crafted leather printing rollers. The afternoon changes to the technical and antiseptic computer-speak of anti-alias gifs, non-lossy compression and file transfer protocol: a contrast to the messy and hazardous sounding jargon of printmaking. Both courses share the burden of having to familiarize students with a great deal of technical information and must also cover basic principles of design and historical overviews of the respective mediums. What differs for the printmaking student is that this may be the only time in their lives they will ever make a lithograph.
The computer on the other hand will continue to play a significant role in all their lives, regardless whether they continue in the arts. So beyond helping students to develop a sense of craft (both analogue and digital I might add) and esthetic purpose, it seems that another important matter to address is how printmaking and all other media as well, relate to their lives and jives with their interests.
So, it seems one question to ask is, ‘Why bother?’ Susan Tallman, the art historian who wrote the book The Contemporary Print: Pre-Pop to Postmodern, asked this very question just the other week at a Printmaking Symposium in Portland. Why bother with a technically complicated and archaic form of image making? Are there any definite signs to distinguish a print from a drawing or a photograph when we look at it? Or are we even thinking about distinguishing a print from a drawing or a photograph from a digitally produced ink jet print? This perhaps brings us to the crux of the matter. They are after all just images. What remains important, beyond the actual grammar of process, is how images remain a culturally relevant means of communication. So, is it the technical intricacies of an esoteric process that I am trying to sustain by teaching printmaking or rather a means of image making geared towards intelligence, communication, and multiplicity in whatever form it may take? Most artists will probably overwhelmingly support the latter and other similar issues for all of the arts. But the fact remains that most artistic production depends upon some form of technology whether it be glaze formulas for ceramics, lowering the contrast of a black and white photograph or getting a slab of limestone to print a drawing, as is the case with lithography.
It’s the practical stuff of making art, the foundations of which, we teach here in the Fine Arts Department. With this intimate knowledge of materials and processes, a model is provided for more complex and thorough explorations uniting form with concept.
Before I get into specific examples of art and technology, I want to take a quick look at our current relationship with technology.
The difference between the analogue and the digital, as it is in our case, is very well illustrated in a book about Globalization by Thomas Friedman , foreign affairs correspondent for the NY Times. The title is The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and it is the contrast between this car, 300 manufactured a day almost exclusively by robots, and this tree, rooted to the earth and a community, that exemplify for Friedman the current global situation. One is the quest for modernization and progress, the other is what ‘identifies us and locates us in the world’, and the key between the two is balance. Globalization is the new dominant international system of integration, replacing the Cold War Era of division. Everyone is directly or indirectly effected by globalization and, he acknowledges that these effects can be positive or disruptive. About a year ago, NPR carried a related story about South American street artists and craftsmen who once barely subsisted on tourist purchases, but now wake up in the morning to find new orders received on-line by global armchair tourists. They still do exactly what they did before; just now they have more of it to do, as well as deal with new technologies. It is both a pressure and a necessity we have all probably felt in the wake of the computer.
Unfortunately though, in the last month and a half we have witnessed some of the most devastating repercussions of globalization and the outcome of insensitivity to these balances and issues. But what caught my attention in this book was one of the early chapters on what he called Information Arbitrage. This, to simplify the matter, is the ability to analyze non-linear systems not as individual parts but as an interacting whole. It is the difference between the specialist and the generalist. Specialists are necessary, but there is an increasing need for individuals who can make meaningful connections between seemingly disparate areas of knowledge. It allows for unconsidered perspectives and hybrid forms of understanding. Certainly, the previous show in the Museum of Art, titled the Raw and the Cooked, flung us into this generalist approach, requiring us to develop new associations between the objects to work our way through the juxtapositions presented.
I had encountered this same idea in Barbara Maria Stafford’s book Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. By examining both the history of representation and the new fluid world of digital media she proposes that there must be a new type of imagist, someone who will be able to interconnect new means of imaging and information. Hopefully, in some small way, our efforts here in the Fine Arts Program will work towards this purpose. Emily Blair, the area coordinator for digital imaging and Fran Ho, the same for photography, along with myself, have been fostering overlaps between these areas by organizing collaborative projects for our students. We are now in the process of merging the digital imaging and printmaking areas into the I-Media area, the ‘I’ implying interrelated or interacting.
We are enthusiastic about the creative possibilities this will offer for our students, but are also aware of the complexities it presents while acknowledging the continual changes in technology. Image making for artists working with printmaking, digital imaging and photography has become such a complex and involved process that one could describe it as a technological melting pot. [SLIDE] The series of images by photographer Victor Burgin titled The End from 1998, illustrate this situation well. The images are derived from a combination of film, photography, video and digital media, and finally output as photographs. They present a hybridization of media and 'discontinuous systems' of representation. Convergences such as these continue to expand and diversify the possibilities of a medium whether it is photography, printmaking or both. This spirit of forging a new means of visual expression through combined technologies, methods and forms, has been an integral part of art making since the arrival of photography. Our current fascination with the photographic qualities of ink-jet prints and the high-tech equipment needed to produce them will eventually be replaced by a newer technology. Since technologies and societies do change, I think we can learn the most about the relevance of image making if we take a broader look at its history and purpose.
I decided first to look at a couple of the predecessors to digital imaging and some more recent works that fall into the category of digital prints and photographs. As we will see, the conventions of digital imaging often have more to do with photography than printmaking, but there often is a great deal of integration between past conventions and new technologies.
[SLIDE] During the 1920’s and 30’s, the convergence of photography, printing and politics, know as photomontage, expanded the concept of the image to include the dissemination of multiple moments of time. Charles Cross’s book A Picture of America, published during the darkest moments of the depression, uses photojournalistic montages to illustrate social crisis and change. This propaganda, for the benefits of science and technology, is a pressure we still feel today not least the co-existence of multiple moments, times and messages. The message in this spread could be easily updated to read: "where all computer sciences and communication technologies plan and balance and create all things for the sake of global commerce." The methods used to create this image, multiple negatives, exposures, printing, and airbrushing, all serve to construct a new ideology and sense of reality where technology is an inescapable part of human life.
[SLIDE] The collages of Hannah Hoch, Raul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters and other artists of the Dada Art Movement also bear special significance to printmaking. They reused printed material from newspapers and magazines of the day to subvert accepted notions of the image. Both absurd and overtly political, collage of this nature was a distinctly modern visual idiom for an urbanized industrial culture. This piece Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada by Hannah Hoch exemplifies this rupture with past methods and conventions of image-making [SLIDE] as does this cover to a Dada publication by John Heartfield along with the help of Raul Hausmann. I should also emphasize that it was commercial printing with its potential for dissemination that was chosen as one of their primary forms for producing art. A similar motivation now exists in the idiom of zines, which are photocopied publications usually created by one person as labor of both love and pain available at record and comic shops for a buck or two.
[SLIDE] Some of the most mordant and satirical photomontages created were directed against the Nazi regime. John Heartfield, whose Like Brother, Like Murdered we see here on the cover of AIZ magazine, masterfully and effectively used the methods of montage and photo-reproduction as means to distribute his political art. For all intents and purposes, Heartfield’s medium was the magazine, because it was through this format that he chose to have his message understood. This overt union of politics and art with mechanical reproduction is a strong contrast to the often hidden or disguised political and ethical issues lurking within altered digital images.
[SLIDE] Forty years later pop artists revived the use of images from the media marking another significant change in our relationship to image making and our visual landscape. Robert Rauschenberg’s screenprint painting ‘Skyway’, from the mid-sixties, is an example of these developing changes. Images such as these mark our approach to digital speed in the realm of image making. The mechanical and immediate nature of four-color photo-screenprinting is used to deconstruct images of popular culture and the contemporary media landscape in a time when society was attempting to rewrite what it could be. His imagery, taken directly from the street, the newspaper and the TV, communicated the dissolution of the mechanical age, at the dawn of the information age.
[SLIDE] The confidence with which Rauschenberg assembles appropriated imagery and painting on a physical surface has now been replaced, for better or worse, by the proliferation of image editing software. [SLIDE] I must also mention that some of his recent prints now employ ink-jet print transfers that only require water to be released from the original substrate. A re-occurring contrast between harsh toxic methods and new more environmentally sound processes.
[SLIDE] Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, probably more than any other artwork, broke down the divide between fine art and mass production. High art and low culture meet in these dimensional prints and the art object becomes indistinguishable from the product it replicates. [SLIDE] But the print, in pop art, is still central to understanding our relationship to consumer culture, mechanical reproduction and the transmission of images to a mass audience. Richard Hamilton’s middle class interiors depict an environment dominated not by the inhabitants but the products they own. Pop artists managed to embrace consumer culture with cool irony. They were conscious of the extent to which advertising and consumerism had saturated our lives a saturation that is now omnipresent while the power of its pervasiveness remains elusive.
[SLIDE] Now, in our current era, artists often perceive digital imaging as inherently manipulating and use it to reveal this and the deeper complexities of the relationship between technology and culture.
Nancy Burson's digitally generated montages of the leaders of world powers presents a salient image of the end of the cold war and the widespread emergence of digital technologies and the dissolution of boundaries these both bring. In this image, she has used the computer to create an oddly familiar individual who is in fact a hybrid of Mihkal Gorbachev and Ronald Regan.
[SLIDE] The artist Joseph Nechvatal has used the computer for about fifteen years to create his robotically assisted paintings. Recently, he has subjected images from his archived image bank to computer virus programs of his creation. The results are decorative fields of pattern and color. But these are not purely visual non-representational works. The original images, once culturally meaningful, have been recognized as impermanent and mutating. Concerned with the effects of sexually transmitted disease as the well as the effects of technology on information, his works destabilize meaning and visual pleasure.
[SLIDE] The Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura explores difficult cultural and historical issues through his carefully staged revisions of famous paintings. By positing himself within the cannon of western painting, he forces us to recognize what has been denied both to him, and us. This image titled Portrait (Six Brides) from 1991, employs painting, theater, photography, and digital imaging. As he uses himself exclusively in his photo-paintings, it was an easy step to move into the use of digital imaging. What tool is better suited to the means of subversive replication and imitation where identities become slippery and disguised.
[SLIDE] This image by Gretchen Bender titled Entertainment Cocoon from 1993 is directly concerned with the effect of mediation on contemporary culture. The hypnotic warping effects, easily attained with the use of digital imaging software, belie the ominous implications of the source imagery. For Bender, the fighter planes possess a lethal seduction. We are reminded that much of the digital technology we use would be non-existent without the research and funding of the government and military.
If these are some of the prevailing themes of digital imaging what does this mean for artists working with printmaking who move towards the exclusive use of digital tools or seek an integration of traditional methods with the digital? Truly, I think this is something that we are confronting right now, and will continue to grapple with for a while to come. An exhibit this year at the Brooklyn Museum of Art titled Digital: Printmaking Now confronted these contentious issues head on. In Marilyn Kushner’s opening essay to the catalog for the exhibition she quotes Paul Valery from 1934 who says: "For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art."
[SLIDE] Artist Peter Halley has certainly changed these expectations of artistic production in some of his recent projects. He considers digitally stored information a reproducible matrix just as any printing plate would be.
In 1996 the department of prints at the Museum of Modern Art purchased, not the wallpaper and flowcharts that comprised his installation at the museum, but the computer disk that contained the information to produce the prints.
Now, not only can they output his images though any printing media they desire, but have also extended the project with him to the internet. This interactive coloring book of an exploding box makes anyone with a personal computer and a printer a collaborator in his project. I must say working with Peter was a real joy and delightfully uncomplicated. But underneath the humor of the ‘Exploding Cell’ he is certainly alluding to detonated physical and technological boundaries.
[SLIDE] The final example I have chosen, exists in digital format only, to be viewed through an Internet browser. In many ways the Electric Poster Series, and other projects at Piotr Szyhalski’s web-site The Spleen, speak to the history and power of printmaking through a medium which now surpasses all others in its capability of dispersal. Beyond being able to transmit his art and propaganda globally he uses the interactive possibilities of the medium to make the viewer complicit in the messages of the posters. Indebted to Heartfield, and photomechanical reproduction, he applies these historical conventions to the Internet in the same spirit of his predecessors.
In this hasty overview, I have tried to cover a range of images and issues that hopefully shed light on what will be affecting artists for many years to come. The last 10 years have seen enormous changes in global politics, economics and technology. That artists and art making too should experience equally significant changes only seems inevitable. Evolution is necessary to survival and, as the saying now goes in our electronic era of e-mail and telecommunication, ‘E or Be Eaten’. So, there is a future for printmaking, a changing and evolving future. Even in the wake of photography, TV and the Internet, printed images have remained a vital medium for addressing cultural issues.