What Makes a Printmaker
After leaving Belmar, I dropped off the arcade block in my Studio. With some afternoon hours to spare, I continued up Main through Asbury, picked up Ocean Avenue, and continued on up to Long Branch. The purpose was to see this year's edition of the annual Fresh Meat exhibition at SICA. This time around the new NJ visual arts MFA grads are from Mason Gross, Montclair, and Jersey City. I wasn't particularly impressed. A few interesting pieces, but generally little evidence of technical skills or complex concepts.
After looking at the show in the main gallery, I hung out in the cafe for a while (surrounded by the art of discussion group member Jane A. Craven, who has her studio there) with SICA's founder and executive director Doug Ferrari, and a couple of interns, themselves heading off to undergrad art programs in the fall. Sometime after the kids left, we somehow got into a discussion involving a mutual acquaintance. Turns out Doug and I both earned MA's at Montclair State, our years slightly overlapping, and we both had classes with a character named Anthony. A few years later when I was in Carbondale, I asked one of the other grads how he ended up in the program and his response was that "every department needs a problem child." Anthony may have been ours at Montclair.
The story I told today involved a mid semester critique in a printmaking class that we were both in. Anthony shows up with a series of large silk screen prints-maybe 10 or 12, multiple colors, editions of 50. He gives a complex explanation for the conceptual nature behind the work, which seemed reasonable to everyone. But the professor had a question- when had he done all the work? The prints represented hundreds of hours of labor, but he had never been seen working on them in class. Anthony's answer- he hired a print shop to do them. His opinion was that the concept was the only important part, so if he could afford to pay someone to do them, there was no need for him to get involved in the process. As a professional artist, he told us, he would not be expected to make his own prints anyway. This led to one of the more spirited in class discussions in my academic career, with pretty much everyone of the opposite opinion. The main argument against his position was that it was a printmaking class, which implied that part of the grade was based on demonstrating the technical ability to make prints. Don't know what grade the professor ended up giving him.
However, Anthony was correct in part of his argument- the professional art world would have no expectation for him to be involved in the actual process of making the print, or any other form of art. Plenty of examples out there- in a seminar class he and I both took in 1990 we saw a large SoHo exhibition by Cary Leibowitz consisting of piles of manufactured items, painted, embossed, embroidered, etc with his text. More famous are artists such as Jeff Koons, or Damien Hirst, who recently managed to sell at auction $200 million worth of "art" that he conceived but had nothing to do with making. High end galleries everywhere deal in prints by famous artists (mostly painters) whose only involvement was approving a design and signing the edition. And don't even get me started with the claim of giclees as real prints.
This isn't exactly new. Professional artists through all of history regularly had assistants handle some of the less important/skilled parts of their process. Even going back to the beginnings of woodcut in both Europe and Asia, there was a division of labor, with the credited artist responsible for creating the original image, but professional block cutters and printers often taking over after that. There are plenty of exceptions over the years- painters who enjoyed the print process, and pure printmakers who became famous on their own. Woodcut artists of the modern period were generally involved in all phases of production. The print artists who I consider my peers, such as the Outlaw Printmakers, are all people who create their own block/plate/stone/screen and who can print their own work. I wouldn't want to turn over production of my prints to anyone else, even if I could.
So was what Anthony brought to that print class art? Absolutely. Did it make him a printmaker? Absolutely not. Does it matter? I guess everyone can decide that for themselves.
After looking at the show in the main gallery, I hung out in the cafe for a while (surrounded by the art of discussion group member Jane A. Craven, who has her studio there) with SICA's founder and executive director Doug Ferrari, and a couple of interns, themselves heading off to undergrad art programs in the fall. Sometime after the kids left, we somehow got into a discussion involving a mutual acquaintance. Turns out Doug and I both earned MA's at Montclair State, our years slightly overlapping, and we both had classes with a character named Anthony. A few years later when I was in Carbondale, I asked one of the other grads how he ended up in the program and his response was that "every department needs a problem child." Anthony may have been ours at Montclair.
The story I told today involved a mid semester critique in a printmaking class that we were both in. Anthony shows up with a series of large silk screen prints-maybe 10 or 12, multiple colors, editions of 50. He gives a complex explanation for the conceptual nature behind the work, which seemed reasonable to everyone. But the professor had a question- when had he done all the work? The prints represented hundreds of hours of labor, but he had never been seen working on them in class. Anthony's answer- he hired a print shop to do them. His opinion was that the concept was the only important part, so if he could afford to pay someone to do them, there was no need for him to get involved in the process. As a professional artist, he told us, he would not be expected to make his own prints anyway. This led to one of the more spirited in class discussions in my academic career, with pretty much everyone of the opposite opinion. The main argument against his position was that it was a printmaking class, which implied that part of the grade was based on demonstrating the technical ability to make prints. Don't know what grade the professor ended up giving him.
However, Anthony was correct in part of his argument- the professional art world would have no expectation for him to be involved in the actual process of making the print, or any other form of art. Plenty of examples out there- in a seminar class he and I both took in 1990 we saw a large SoHo exhibition by Cary Leibowitz consisting of piles of manufactured items, painted, embossed, embroidered, etc with his text. More famous are artists such as Jeff Koons, or Damien Hirst, who recently managed to sell at auction $200 million worth of "art" that he conceived but had nothing to do with making. High end galleries everywhere deal in prints by famous artists (mostly painters) whose only involvement was approving a design and signing the edition. And don't even get me started with the claim of giclees as real prints.
This isn't exactly new. Professional artists through all of history regularly had assistants handle some of the less important/skilled parts of their process. Even going back to the beginnings of woodcut in both Europe and Asia, there was a division of labor, with the credited artist responsible for creating the original image, but professional block cutters and printers often taking over after that. There are plenty of exceptions over the years- painters who enjoyed the print process, and pure printmakers who became famous on their own. Woodcut artists of the modern period were generally involved in all phases of production. The print artists who I consider my peers, such as the Outlaw Printmakers, are all people who create their own block/plate/stone/screen and who can print their own work. I wouldn't want to turn over production of my prints to anyone else, even if I could.
So was what Anthony brought to that print class art? Absolutely. Did it make him a printmaker? Absolutely not. Does it matter? I guess everyone can decide that for themselves.
posted by arrabbiata at 7:06 PM
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